Use the iPad to organize your life with the default Contacts, Calendar, Notes, and Reminders apps. Gary Rosenzweig takes a close look at some of the things you can do with these apps in this chapter from My iPad mini, 3rd Edition.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

In this chapter, we learn how to add and look up contacts and calendar events. We also look at the Notes and Reminders apps.

Adding a Contact

Searching for a Contact

Working with Contacts

Creating a Calendar Event

Using Calendar Views

Creating Calendars

Creating Notes

Setting Reminders

Setting Clock Alarms

Whether you are a well-connected businessperson or just someone who has lots of friends, you can use the iPad to organize your life with the default Contacts, Calendar, Notes, and Reminders apps. Let’s take a close look at some of the things you can do with these apps.

Adding a Contact

The primary way iPad users store their contacts is to use Apple’s iCloud service. This places your contacts database on Apple’s servers, making them available to you on any iOS device or Mac you use. You can even access them from a PC with Apple’s iCloud.com website. It also keeps all these devices in sync; so any time you add or edit a contact, the change will show up everywhere.

The Contacts app on your iPad is how you access and modify your contacts. Let’s start by adding a new contact from scratch.

Tap the Contacts app icon to launch the app.

Press the + button near the top of the screen. A New Contact form and keyboard appear.

Type the first name of the contact. No need to use Shift to capitalize the name because that happens automatically.

Tap the return key on the keyboard to advance to the next field and type the last name for the contact. If you are adding a company instead of a person, skip the first and last name fields and use only the Company field. The contact will be listed under the company name.

To add more information, like a phone number, tap the green + button next to the field name.

If you ever want to remove some information from the contact, you can use the red – buttons.

You can add more than one phone number per contact. Some contacts may have many: home, work, mobile, and so on.

Tap Add Photo to add a photo from one of your photo albums or take one right now using your iPad’s camera.

Don’t Worry About Formatting

You don’t need to type phone numbers with parentheses or dashes. Your iPad formats the number for you.

You can add one or more email addresses to the contact as well. These will be used in your Mail app when you compose a new message. You will only need to type the person’s name, or choose them from a list, instead of typing their email address.

You can add one or more physical addresses for the contact.

You can select a specific ringtone for the contact that is used when they call you via FaceTime. You can also set a specific Text tone for Messages.

You can swipe up to see more fields. You can even add custom fields and notes to a contact.

You can set a nickname field in a contact. When you do this, and the contact happens to be yours, Siri will call you by that name. You can always tell Siri: “Call me name” and it will change your nickname field even if you are not in the Contacts app at the moment.

You can also set relationships in your contacts by saying things like “Debby is my wife.”